The Lions of Al-Rassan

It was the proper thing to do, and it could possibly have even been achieved, had the order come earlier.

Alvar never forgot that evening and night as long as he lived.

He would wake in terror from a dream that he was in Fezana again at sunset watching the mob approach. That memory marked him and stayed with him as nothing in his life ever had and only one moment after—also at sunset—was ever to do.

They had arrived that afternoon, crowding in ahead of the Jaddite dust cloud with a frightened swarm of people from the countryside. The five of them had raced all the way west from Ragosa across the hills and meadows of springtime. They had left the day after Carnival, immediately after burying Velaz with Kindath rites and the slain soldier in a Jaddite ceremony.

No time to mourn. Ibn Khairan had made that clear based on what he had learned, and Jehane, wild with fear for her parents, could not have lingered. They were out of Ragosa by mid-afternoon: Alvar, Husari, Jehane, ibn Khairan—and Rodrigo Belmonte. All of them exhausted after the night just past, all aware that in the mood of this spring something monstrous could happen.

They made the ten days' journey in six, riding into the darkness, arriving late one afternoon to a place where they could see the walls of Fezana. They had already seen the dust cloud that was the army of Valledo.

It was Rodrigo who spotted it. He had pointed, and then exchanged a long glance with ibn Khairan that Alvar could not interpret. Jehane bit her lip, gazing north. Husari said something under his breath that might have been a prayer.

For Alvar, despite weariness and anxiety, the sight of a cloud of dust stirred up by the Horsemen of Valledo in Al-Rassan stirred him deeply. Then he looked again at Jehane and Husari and back to ibn Khairan, and confusion arose once more. How did it happen that something one had desired all one's life became cause for doubt and apprehension?

"They are moving very fast," ibn Khairan had said, finally.

"Too fast," Rodrigo murmured. "They will outstrip some of the fleeing villagers. I don't understand. They want as many mouths in the city as possible."

"Unless this isn't to be a siege."

"What else can it be? He isn't about to storm those walls."

Ibn Khairan looked northwards again from their vantage point, high on a hill east of the city. "Perhaps just the vanguard is flying," he said. "For some reason."

"That wouldn't make sense either," Rodrigo had replied, his brow furrowed. He sounded edgy to Alvar, not exultant at all.

"Does it matter?" Jehane asked sharply. "Come on!"

She had ridden at a soldier's pace all the way. Indeed, there were times when Rodrigo or ibn Khairan had had to restrain her, lest they ruin the horses with their speed.

Her relationship with ibn Khairan had changed since Carnival. They tried not to show it too plainly on the ride, but it was there to be seen, in the man as much as in the woman. Alvar was making an effort not to let this distract him. He was only partly successful in that. It seemed that life could throw confusion and pain at you from many directions.

They came down from that height to cross the moat and enter the city. Alvar for the first time, Jehane and Husari coming home, ibn Khairan returning to where Almalik I had tried to destroy his reputation and curb his power.

And Rodrigo?

Alvar understood that the Captain was with them, disguised as an Asharite—his moustache shaved off, hair and skin darkened—because he had sworn an oath to Velaz ben Ishak to defend the woman who was here with them. He was not a man who forswore his oaths.

Jehane's parents were to be delivered from Fezana and a warning given to the other Kindath. That was the immediate task. After, they would have to turn again to sorting out loyalties and the next steps. They were all, as best Alvar understood, still to join the army of Ragosa somewhere west of Lonza, on the way to Cartada.

The dust cloud north of them had probably altered that.

With Jaddites invading Al-Rassan, did Ragosa still make war on Cartada? Asharite against Asharite with the Horsemen down through the tagra! And did the most renowned leader of Jaddite soldiers in the peninsula fight for Ragosa at such a time?

Alvar, one of those Jaddite soldiers, had no idea. On the ride west he had sensed an emerging distance between ibn Khairan and Ser Rodrigo. Not a coldness, certainly not opposition. It was more like ... a marshalling of defenses. Each man fortifying himself against what might be coming.

Husari, normally voluble and perceptive, was no help at all in trying to sort this out. He kept his own counsel all the way here.

He had killed his first man in the square at Carnival. Jehane, in one of her few exchanges with Alvar on the ride, said she thought that might be the trouble. Husari had been a merchant not a warrior. A gentle man, a lazy, soft one, even. He had slain a Muwardi assassin that night, though, smashing his skull with a blow, spilling brains and blood on the cobblestones.

That could shake a man, Alvar thought. Not all were made for a soldier's life and what came with it.

Truth to tell—though he told no one this—Alvar wasn't certain any more if he was made for that life, either. That was frightening. If he wasn't this, what was he? But it appeared that a soldier needed to be able to see things in extremely simple terms and Alvar had come to realize that he wasn't especially good at that.

On the fourth morning he had broached this much, diffidently, with the Captain. Rodrigo had ridden in silence a long time before answering. Birds had been singing; the spring day was bright.

"You may be too intelligent to be a good soldier," Rodrigo had said, finally.

Which wasn't really what Alvar wanted to hear. It sounded like a rejection. "What about you?" he demanded. "You have been, all your life."

Rodrigo hesitated again, choosing his words. "I grew up in a different age, Alvar, though it was only a little before yours. When the khalifs ruled in Al-Rassan we lived in fear of our lives in the north. We were raided once, sometimes twice, a year. Every year. Even after the raids began to stop, we children were frightened into bed at night with warnings about the infidels coming to take us away if we were bad. We dreamed of miracles, reversals. Of coming back."

"So did I!"

"But now you can, don't you see? It isn't a dream any more. The world has changed. When you can do what you dreamed about, sometimes it isn't ... as simple any more." Rodrigo looked at Alvar. "I don't know if that makes any sense at all."

"I don't either," Alvar said glumly.

The Captain's mouth quirked at that, and Alvar realized he hadn't been very respectful.

"Sorry," he said quickly. He remembered—it seemed an unbelievably long time ago—the day Rodrigo had knocked him from his horse just outside Esteren for such impertinence.

Rodrigo only shook his head now. The world had changed. "Try this, if it helps," he said. "How easy do you find it to think of the three people we're riding with as infidels, vile in their ways and loathsome to the god?"

Alvar blinked. "But we always knew there was honor in Al-Rassan."

Rodrigo shook his head. "No. Be honest. Think about this. Some of us did, Alvar. The clerics deny it to this day. I have a feeling your mother would. Think of Vasca's Isle. The very idea of holy war denies it: Asharites and Kindath are an attack upon Jad. Their existence wounds our god. That's what we've all been taught for centuries. No room for acknowledging honor, let alone grandeur in an enemy. Not in a war driven by such beliefs. That's what I'm trying—badly—to say. It's one thing to make war for your country, your family, even in pursuit of glory. It's another to believe that the people you fight are embodiments of evil and must be destroyed for that. I want this peninsula back. I want Esperana great again, but I will not pretend that if we smash Al-Rassan and all it has built we are doing the will of any god I know."